Powerline:

It is hard to imagine how Pennsylvania could have gone farther to assure that every legitimate voter can, with no difficulty, vote. Not to mention the fact that if 10% of adult Pennsylvanians don’t have photo IDs, and therefore can’t buy alcoholic beverages, fly on airplanes, cash a check, purchase a firearm, or otherwise participate in modern life–an absurd claim–the law will allow them, finally, to emerge from the shadows. If the Democrats were not engaging in contemptible demagoguery and actually cared about the constituencies they claim to represent, they would hail such legislation as a giant step forward.

Here in Minnesota, we too are fighting the battle over ballot integrity. For years, a large majority of Minnesotans have favored a photo ID requirement. As you probably know, we have had at least one major election–Al Franken’s “victory” over Norm Coleman–that almost certainly was swung by illegal votes (not in the recount phase, but on Election Day). Our legislature passed a photo ID bill, but our Democratic Governor, flouting the will of a clear majority of citizens, vetoed it. So now the measure will be on the ballot in November as a constitutional amendment. Our Democratic Secretary of State re-named the proposed amendment to make it less appealing to voters; thus does the establishment pull out any stops necessary to preserve the option of voter fraud.

It’s time to face reality:  the contemporary Democrat Party is the New Left incarnate — the party of Ayers, progressive activists, 60s radical chic retreads, and would-be tyrants who believe that, in order to achieve Utopia, one simply can’t rely on the mewling masses to vote the proper way.

Therefore, the ends justify the means.  Worse still, in the fevered authoritarian brains of these paper tyrants, because they’ve adopted a particular political worldview they’ve convinced themselves is good and right, they are able to justify all they do as in the service of the good and the right — and they are good and righteous for being willing to fight for their vision by any means necessary, and in direct conflict with the will of those people not quite intelligent enough to see how the New Left way is the right way.

It’s frankly heartening to see the generally more collegial sites like Powerline beginning to recognize what it is we are truly up against here.  This is not the Democratic Party of old.

And by not acknowledging that — and so fighting it with traditional political calculation and triangulation — the GOP has moved troublingly left, and is essentially now being run like the Democrat Party of yesteryear.

If you want to defeat the forces who are right now trying to take this country over in perpetuity — by building the dependent class, crashing the entitlement system, ruining the currency, and stoking tribalism and class warfare, moves they believe will usher in a reboot of the US as a socialist / collectivist Utopia managed, conveniently enough, by a permanent political class (among whose numbers they count themselves) — you must first acknowledge what who and what they are, and stop rationalizing away what it is they are clearly doing.

They rely on your fear of ridicule and on shaming you. They use their media arm to convince you that you are outnumbered, an outlier, a dirty and repulsive and unsophisticated throwback possibly suffering from a mental disorder.

— The good news being that if you can keep those tools from working on you — and then begin rescuing the language and restoring its tether to kernel assumptions promoting the foundations of classical liberalism rather than collectivism — you can defeat these paper tigers.

They are sophists and demagogues, anti-foundationalists and would-be masterminds whose “right” to determine the way we all live is a chimera, waved away with a confident hand.

Sadly, too many on “our” side — particularly among the ruling elite and within the ranks of our opinion leaders — so fear the shame and the ridicule that they are more likely to attack us for provoking such maneuvers from the left than they are to fight back against them.

That has to stop.

Because if it doesn’t, there will surely come a reimagining of this once great and free land, the last best hope that today teeters on the edge of a permanent unwelcome change.

Just as promised.

(h/t sdferr)